Le Peintre Francisco Goya

By 1826 Francisco de Goya, once first painter to the Spanish king, was living in self-imposed exile in Bordeaux, out of reach of a reactionary court he no longer trusted. That year, aged eighty, he made a short trip back to Madrid, and the court's leading portraitist, Vicente Lopez, seized the chance to paint him. Goya sits in an armchair with his legs crossed, a palette in one hand and a brush in the other, his white hair thinning and his eyes still sharp. Lopez made the picture for the Royal Museum, today the Prado, as a kind of official homage while the old man was still alive to sit for it. Within two years Goya was dead in Bordeaux, and this remained the last portrait made of him from life.